From Mendoza to La Rioja

It takes a while to really start to listen in a new place. Being on the move so much keeps the mind engaged: there are always plans to be made, bus routes to ponder, bus companies to be compared at terminals, buses to book, hostels or hotels to compare, taxis to hail; there is always the language barrier to be overcome yet again, trying to make myself understood, trying to understand what the other means. It is a wonderfully spontaneous way of experiencing a country, a place. Listening, however, just sitting, being quiet, letting all your senses experience your surroundings – that takes a while.

It is what I am doing right now, in the tiled open space in front of our room here at the 'Residencial Anita' in La Rioja. We are a few blocks away from the centre of this city of about 180,000, and while I can hear traffic it is not overly loud. People get up late here – no wonder, since streets are teeming with life until in the early hours of the morning – and even the voices of the proprietess's children didn't drift up to me until a little while ago. There is the constant chirping of sparrows, cooing of pigeons – but there is a whole lot of other birdsong, too, now that I have opened my ears to them; even the sound of the vacuum cleaner can't drown them out completely.

Most of yesterday we spent on the bus from Mendoza to La Rioja. From our front seats on the top level we had a prime view, and it is the only place on a bus where one can entertain even a faint hope of taking photos. The drawback is that the sun, too, has full access through those big windows, and the air condition isn't always up to par, so it can get pretty hot.

For the first little while after leaving Mendoza there was still a fair bit of agriculture: fields of onions and potatoes, vineyards and olive plantations. Soon, however, this changed to a landscape all too familiar to us from other travels in Argentina: dry, sandy soil, thorny shrubbery in different shapes and heights, as far as the eye could see. It is a landscape so monotonous that it is hard to stay attentive, and time and again I fell asleep, only to wake up half an hour or three quarters of an hour later to the very same sight. 

Once I woke up because the road had suddenly gotten a lot rougher. When I looked out I saw the original paved road a few feet above me to the left, part of it broken off, a deep dry riverbed beside it: a terrible flood must have washed out the road at some point, by all indications quite a while ago since the surface we were driving on had been graded and gravelled, and speed signs had been installed. I imagine there is no money to repair the road and return it to its original state. A few kilometres later we were back on the real highway. Seeing how very dry it is one can't imagine that there could ever be water running in these dry gullies.

Other than at our first visit in January/February of 2009, when it looked completely desolate and hardly alive anymore, the shrubs were starting to green up now. Once in awhile there was a burst of the most stunning yellow, again not unlike the blooming desert shrubs that had so delighted me in Arizona and California in the spring. So far, they are only in full bloom here and there, but all over buds are waiting to open, and I imagine in a couple of weeks the landscape will be transformed into a sea of gold. With luck, I will still get to see that.

Shortly before six pm I woke up from another slumber. This time a wall of solid green – albeit still the same kind of bush as before – greeted the eye to my right, whereas long rows of olive trees stretched out to the left, with mountains forming a dramatic backdrop. The light had mellowed now that the sun was on its way down, and everything looked a lot friendlier. Only a few minutes later we reached the outskirts of La Rioja.